The invention concerns a sabot projectile with a subcaliber penetrator and a sabot, which comprises a propulsion element that acts on the rear end of the penetrator, a segmented, essentially cylindrical guide cage, which is connected to the front end of the propulsion element, and a segmented, disk-shaped metal guide element that extends radially inward in the front area of the guide cage and holds the penetrator.
A sabot projectile of this type is disclosed, for example, by DE 43 30 417 C2. It has an essentially hollow cylindrical aluminum or plastic guide cage that consists of two segments and is joined as a single piece with the disk-shaped guide element.
In a guide cage that has an integrated guide element and is made of aluminum or some other metal, the portion of the sabot projectile that is dead load is relatively high. On the other hand, if the guide cage and the guide element are both made of plastic, it has been found in practice that the front guide region is too soft, so that radial deviations of the penetrator can occur during the passage of the sabot projectile through the gun barrel, which can lead to the destruction of the front guide region of the sabot.
Therefore, it has already been proposed that the guide cage be produced from a fiber-reinforced plastic and the disk-shaped guide element be produced from a metal, preferably an aluminum alloy, and that the two parts then be joined by a form-locking and/or frictional connection. Due to the high modulus of elasticity of a guide element made of metal, the guide element is better able to absorb shearing forces than a corresponding guide element made of fiber-reinforced plastic. The relatively light guide cage made of fiber-reinforced plastic then only needs to hold the metal guide element in its axial position during the axial acceleration of the sabot projectile in a corresponding gun barrel.
However, it has been found that, due to the design-related basic play between the inside wall of the gun barrel from which the sabot projectile is to be fired and the outer periphery of the disk-shaped guide element, the guide element can buckle and break as a result of the high axial acceleration of the projectile in the gun barrel in the areas not supported by the wall of the gun barrel.
The unpublished patent application DE 10 2008 029 395.4 relates to the use of light metal (for example, an aluminum or magnesium alloy) for guide cages of this type. This makes it possible to produce them in an especially cost-effective way if a section is extruded and then finished (for example, the section is bored out) and segmented or divided in the axial direction.